The Lord of the Rings….

J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1-volume *The Hobbit,* and his trilogy, *The Lord of the Rings…*
Aye well… I think I may be condemned to re-read Tolkien’s *Lord of the Rings.* We started watching the Peter Jackson-produced movie, “The Fellowship of the Rings,” and… I fell asleep within half an hour.

I know – I’m a sinner beyond belief. But, as I’ve said, I did once read through the entire trilogy – plus “The Hobbit,” which is of course now itself a movie trilogy (!). So, in some kind of penance for sleepiness or whatever, I think I may have to go to the public library tomorrow, and see if Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” is available — or has been signed out completely.

And our 5-year-old grandson, Alaric — who was discussing how one counts from 1,000 to 10,000 this afternoon (“It’s easy, Papa you count from one to 10, and add 1,000 each time”) — apparently has graduated from naming all the known dinosaurs — a 4-year-old’s obsession — to watching these incredibly nightmarish Peter Jackson versions of Tolkien, over and over. But he claims this does not scare him: “I don’t get scared at movies or stories. I only get scared at things that are in my head,” he explains cheerfully.

So I go to school once more. Why did I let Tolkien’s doggerel epigrams prevent me from appreciating this great medieval scholar’s anti-Hitler creation, when I last read them, in independent study with an English major at Clark University (in Worcester, Mass – the same school which presented Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung with honorary doctorates in 1909, by the way)? We sat in my garret office, and he held forth about the great battles between good and evil, about the destruction of the Fellowship of the Ring, about the ultimate surrender of the great Ring of Power to keep it out of the hands of the greatest Evil in the Universe… and I let my mind stray, to Tolkien’s editorial work on the magnificent medieval romance, *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” I let my critical response to Tolkien’s epigrammatic little poems, those couplets and quatrains between chapters in this gigantic work, distract me from appreciating the genuine literary — and other — power of this great scholar.

At the same time, I was reading and re-reading CS Lewis – not only “Mere Christianity,” of course, but also his “Courtly Love,” that learned work which yet gave no credit to the non-Christian, Arabic versions of that medieval phenomenon, instead attributing it to the mostly French — and English — cultural phenomenon, the abandonment by the Crusaders, off attempting to wrest The Holy Land from the same Arabic tenants of Jerusalem, of their ladies and squires in the castles of their homelands, with the obvious result of the illicit courtship of their wives by these squires, and the resulting medieval lyrics and courtly romances. This obsession of my graduate school generation clearly distracted me from Tolkien.

I admit it. It meant that I only half-read this powerful work , composed in the face of the threatening rise of the insane dictator Adolf Hitler across the English Channel, this great medieval scholar attempting to warn his countrymen of this gathering threat to civilization which eventually brought on the evils of the concentration camps and the slaughter of more than six million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other “non-acceptable, non-Aryan” inhabitants of Germany and, indeed, continental Europe, and which threatened to overtake and conquer Britain also.

So. I repent of my child-adult absence from this literary reality, which has become the gigantic cinematic creation — and obsession — of this generation. The only thing I can do do, clearly, is to attempt to make amends, first of all by returning to Tolkien’s huge tomes, and after that, perhaps, join Alaric in absorbing the powerful filmic version of this work of art.

If I therefore absent myself somewhat from the “social media” within which I now feel I have spent a little too much time over the past few weeks and months, I hope you will understand why I am doing so. Perhaps you will join me — and Alaric.

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